


In Blue

by anneapocalypse



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: F/F, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-20
Updated: 2015-07-20
Packaged: 2018-04-10 07:04:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4382012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anneapocalypse/pseuds/anneapocalypse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You know I wanted to be a pacifist?"</p><p>"Those still exist?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Blue

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Kimball Appreciation Week and [originally posted on tumblr](http://anneapocalypse.tumblr.com/post/124362641251/in-blue).

“What color is she from space?”

Carolina blinks. “What?”

“Chorus. I’ve never been offworld.”

Carolina stares.  _Stares_. Vanessa swears she can see a galaxy spin in each pupil, the blue glow of the algae caught reflected where the green of her irises goes dark. “God, I… guess you wouldn’t have, would you.”

“I was born here,” Vanessa says, softly. “Things were very different, back then.”

“You were born after Harvest, right?”

 

 _After Harvest._  A generation who had never known a time they weren’t at war. Vanessa knows that in the abstract. Knows it more intimately in the militant order in which Carolina keeps her footlocker, her habit of snapping out of bed at oh-five-hundred sharp without an alarm to wake her, a habit that goes much further back than her commision. 7-12 military academy, Carolina told her once. A soldier in the making since childhood. And Vanessa knows the harsh necessity of that, even if the circumstances are different.

 

 _What is peace_ , a little girl asked the blue sky.  _What is war._

War was a faraway thing that could, in theory, crash down out of the sky at any time. Here on the outer edges of human-occupied space, on a planet named  _Chorus_ by the first colonists, who enjoyed a  _laissez-faire_  attitude from the UNSC in those early years.

Chorus was a colonist’s dream. Remote, rich in resources, and as they soon discovered, laden with artifacts. Alien temples reaching for the blue sky, atmosphere so Earth-like that little terraforming was needed. Grasslands, forests, canyons and glacial valleys, mountains and lakes.

Chorus.

But nothing holds together.

 

It took the UNSC years to grasp what they were sitting on.

Vanessa was ten or so when her little colony exploded with new settlers. Ship after ship docking with passengers waking from cryo. So many they had to build a new spaceport. There was talk of a space elevator, lunar expansion, perhaps even branching out the project into the rest of the system.

But the UNSC didn’t just sent colonists. They sent leaders. Their own. A new government to replace their loose Colonial Council.

They were told: The Chorus Colonization Group is now the Chorus Federation. These are your laws. These are your leaders. This is how you will live.

They expanded across the planet's largest continent. Built more infrastructure. More cities. Armonia sprawled outward from its center like a sunburst. A new generation of Chorus was born.

 

Vanessa skips a stone across the blue-green surface of the reservoir. “You know I wanted to be a pacifist?”

“Those still exist?” Carolina says, dryly but not unkindly.

Vanessa snorts. “I know you’re  _career_ , so I’ll let that one slide, but yes.”

“I’m not knocking it,” Carolina reassures her, amusement creeping out from under her affectionate tone. “Hell, look how  _career_ worked out for me.”

“There were a lot of us in the early days. Nonviolent resistance.” She sifts a new stone from the sandy ground. Not quite flat enough to skip. She worries it between her fingers instead. “We tried.”

Carolina eyes her, gone quiet.

“We tried,” Vanessa says again, sighing, and tosses the stone into the water, watching the ripples spread. “We really did.”

“I—believe you,” Carolina says, that tense flat tone she gets when she really doesn’t know what to say but feels like she has to say something. Vanessa knows it pretty well by now, in these moments when she feels the gap in their understanding, the lightyears between their two lives. It’s not so intimidating as it used to be. “What changed that?”

 

What changed. Everything changed. Things fall apart. The Federation blasted the mountaintops one by one and scraped out their insides. Prospectors pillaged the alien ruins, the profits disappearing to gods-knew-where but nowhere that seemed to reach the settlers scraping by under rising inflation and plummeting public benefits. The swell of the police presence in the city, _UNSC_ emblazoned on every uniform, though it seemed the news from outside the system grew scarcer every year. The war never ended, that was all they knew. The Covenant was still out there, a distant specter from which the Federation, graced upon them by the almost-mythical UNSC, would protect them. Silence all dissonance. Remove all threats.

Vanessa remembers it all—the bright flags fluttering in the breeze outside the temple, blue white red green yellow. The sutras she knew from childhood, the prayers for peace, the smell of tear gas in the streets.

She was at university by then, immersed in religious studies and poetry and painting and peaceful protests on and off campus. The same year her mother fell to the cancer from the years in the mines, and the earthy, ashy smell that once brought the comfort of  _Mom’s home_ took on the weight of all her grief and anger, heavy in her lungs.

Then martial law, the marches, the shootings. The chaos the screaming the blue sky spoiled and rank with gas and smoke—

 

She shivers. “Maybe another time.”

They sit in silence for a stretch, skipping stones into the water.

“I never saw,” Carolina admits. Vanessa turns her head. “The planet, I mean. We were already critical when we ripped out of the slipstream. Didn’t get a look before we crashed.”

“She’s a lot like Earth,” Vanessa says. “Or so we’ve been told.”

Carolina hums thoughtfully. “Probably blue, I would think.”

“Yes.” Vanessa looks up at the sky, deepening as evening falls. “I’ve always imagined her in blue.”


End file.
